Batson's Blog

Melissa McCarthy was on fire for a while — several years. Has her time subsided or is it unrealistic to expect someone to stay on top of a particular field for so long? Especially a field that can be as fickle and wishy-washy as show business? Those were the thoughts going through my head as I watched this movie. Probably not a good sign when you’re watching a movie and not actually paying attention to it. The movie started off normal enough. It almost seemed understated compared to some of McCarthy’s other films. I thought it could end up being a family comedy at first. But that soon changed ... somewhat. The problem with this movie is that it straddled the line between family-friendly comedy and ‘outrageous’ comedy. McCarthy is great at playing those potty-mouthed characters. But she’s kind of a one trick pony in that sense. I get the impression she’d like to break out of that mold a bit. McCarthy’s acting was fine in this movie — good, in fact — but her character flopp...

Thanksgiving is the official start to the Christmas season, right? So why not watch a Christmas movie? That's exactly what I decided to do this weekend. I've watched a few of Netflix's cheesy Christmas movies, mostly just to have some sound in my house as I go about chores here and there. Most of them have a facepalm moment or two, but The Christmas Chronicles had multiple facepalm moments. What a horrible movie! I'm typically fairly lenient on the Christmas movies, but it seemed like the writers didn't even try with this movie. It wasn't really bad enough to be funny. It certainly wasn't funny enough to be funny. It was like a bowling shoe: just plain ugly. I was somewhat surprised because with Kurt Russell and Kimberly Williams-Paisley on board, I figured it may be decent. It started off with a heartwarming video montage that made it easy to predict exactly what was going to happen to one of the characters who was in that montage. ...

It took me a while to check out this movie, mostly because it was another unneeded reboot of a popular franchise that wasn’t even that old yet. Angelina Jolie was the face of that character for so long that it felt strange seeing someone else do it (though I think Alicia Vikander may have done a better job). I kind of avoided it out of protest. But I saw it for free recently (that’s always the best price). It was ok. It was a nice set-up for a franchise — the ‘how Lara Croft became Lara Croft’ tale. That would’ve worked well had anyone wanted a new franchise or had Tomb Raider been successful enough to warrant a second film. Unfortunately these days, writers are always planning on trilogies and franchises. They don’t put enough effort into the beginning movie. That’s kind of how this movie played out. It wasn’t bad. Alicia Vikander did a great job actually. Her obvious dedication to the role and believability made the movie much better than it otherwise would have been ...

Ooh. I'm a bit disheartened writing this review because I had such high hopes for this one. Some people don't like Kevin Hart, but I think he's hilarious. He's got this charisma and style to his punchlines that just kills me. The Rock usually does well, too. He's one of the most successful dudes in Hollywood right now. I figured Central Intelligence would be a great movie with those two involved. Unfortunately, I was wrong. This was one of those movies where the trailer showed the best parts of the movie. They took a different route than the typical buddy cop movie plot. Instead of having two guys team up to the save the world, they through a twist in there. The Rock's character -- Bob Stone -- was a good guy. Or was he bad? Or maybe good? Or bad? The storyline throughout the movie had you guessing whether his character was an insane bad guy or a misunderstood agent. It was different. I'll give them credit for that. It didn't r...

I was going to see the sequel G.I. Joe flick earlier, but I unexpectedly found that the normal rate for a evening ticket to a movie is at least $10.00. AMC and Regal Theatres were actually more expensive than $10.00. So, I decided to wait and go to a mid-day showing. $5.00 ticket? Much more reasonable. The medium pop and popcorn still cost about $12, but oh well. Popcorn has always been part of the movie theatre experience for me. Evidently is just now a costly one. I was worried for a moment that I wouldn't get to see the movie. There were projector problems throughout the previews. The Wolverine, opening in May, sounded very cool. The black screen I was watching left me eagerly listening to the entire trailer. Maybe it's better that way. It'll be more of a surprise when I watch it. Thankfully they fixed the video issue before the movie started. There's a pretty fun action sequence that kicks off Retaliation involving Duke (Channing Tatum), Roadblock...

It's been almost a week, but Pink's performance at the Time Warner Cable Arena in Charlotte still has me amazed. I had previously mentioned that I had a small amount of hope that Pink would soar high above the arena the way she does in her televised performances. I wasn't actually expecting it, however, so when she ended up doing just that, I couldn't have been more surprised and entertained. The entire night was like a string of some of her greatest hits, performed just as she does them on TV. In "Try," Pink used some of the same choreography she used during her AMA performance last year. The stunts in "Sober" were changed from her VMA performance, but it worked well. She She added a few new twists though. "Family Portrait," for example, which was performed halfway through the show, was a stripped down ballad, accompanied by a piano. I actually like that version better than the original, which as never been a favorite of...

All I knew about Prometheus was that it was some kind of space adventure movie – most likely involving alien life forms of some kind. I didn’t know, until the last scene, that it was a prequel, of sorts, to the Alien movies. Maybe if I’d known that ahead of time I would have enjoyed Prometheus better than I did. Or, maybe not. I’d put a spoiler alert here, but there’s really nothing worth spoiling, so I won’t bother. It peaked my interest at the start, when an albino human-like being is shown next to a large waterfall. While a ship seems to be taking off into the atmosphere, he takes a sip of something out of a canister and it changes his molecular structure. He falls into the waterfall and then decomposes in the water. All right, so who’s the guy? What did he drink? Why did he decompose? I’m interested in finding out what happened. We go to a scene in Ireland, as two scientists find a cave marking – the same as what are apparently in several other places on Eart...